While Google's been on a roll entering new countries with all its services lately, today is a little different. The Nexus 4 has reached Brazil's shores, but it's not via Google's own-branded storefront. You can pick it up at Fast Shop, Ponto Frio and, presumably, other retailers. No word on when (or if) it might launch on the Play Store.

With the good news comes the bad, though. According to Google's post, the phone starts at $1,699 Brazilian Reals, or about $843 USD. That is an unbelievable premium over the U.S. Play Store version. While it's hard to say how this compares to most handsets without living in the country (residents are free to shed some light in the comments), people on Google+ do not seem happy about the price.

Still, at least the option is there. It may not be all roses and rainbows for the Nexus 4, but at least it's yet another step towards truly global distribution. This will only be good news when it comes time for the next Nexus to launch.

Eric is a snarky technophile with a taste for the unusual. When he's not obsessing about Android, you can usually find him obsessing about movies, psychology, or the perfect energy drink. Eric weaves his own special blend of snark, satire, and comedy into all his articles.

Comments

Ygor Vaz

Let's do a simple math: Nexus 4 16GBS ($350). $1 = ~2R$ (Brazilian Real). So the right price should be R$700. Now let's say that you buy one on eBay and the shipping is $50. So the Nexus 4 16GB + Shipping = $400 = ~R$800 + taxes (60% of the value) = R$1280, so if you import the 16GB Nexus 4 from eBay you will play more or less R$1300, and here they're selling it at R$1700, which is R$400 ($200) of difference. Can you see how expensive everything here is and how high the tax are? Basically, they are selling it 2 times more expensive than it should be.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1745689461 Hal Motley

It's BS how expensive that Nexus 4 is in Brazil. How can a <£300 smartphone cost about ~£600? (I'm British so I am using my currency as an example here).

If prices skyrocket so high like that, how can people afford this stuff?

Vandré Brunazo

The notion of cheap or expensive is relative to comparable prices. Most Brazilians are used to high end smartphones costing around $1000, so that's not considered expensive, it's considered normal. Many are only calling out the N4 expensive here, because these are tech savvy people who understand that in comparison, the US Play Store sells it cheaper. It's all about relative comparison. Compared to what the average Brazilian costumer knows, the N4 is pretty cheap for a high end device.

But most Brazilians actually cannot afford that, lower and mid end devices are much more popular here compared to US and Europe. Those shitty low res underpowered devices, like the Galaxy Ace and similar. That most buyers at US and Europe would think "why the f would you bother?". Those are relatively popular here. Cheap chinese not-so-legal very low end devices, with no warranty devices also sell a lot here.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1745689461 Hal Motley

I can visualise that situation, where cheap and low spec devices sell very well in Brazil and high-end devices are high priced.

I can see what Mozilla are trying to do by bringing a low-priced phone to developing countries, but truth be told we just need a solid, cheap Android phone.

Marcos Amano

Yeah, compared to high end devices here the N4 is pretty cheap. About R$500(~US$250) less than other devices such the S3 at launch time. I'll probably not going to buy it but I'm happy with this price. I hope the S4 will come close to this price range.

GraveUypo

simple, either be rich and deal with it, or buy cheap crap instead. and by cheap crap i mean in quality, not price. it's still more expensive than you pay for your premium stuff.

either that or you import stuff on your own. i personally take trips to paraguay each time i want an expensive electronic device. saved me U$ 350 on my galaxy s3, about U$750, and an immeasurable amount of cash on computer parts over the years. heck even my sound system was, get this, A THIRD of the cheapest price i could find in Brazil itself.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1745689461 Hal Motley

I love the concept of going to another country to buy stuff to avoid tax, but then again it's done in a lot of countries from what I have heard such as Swedish people buying stuff in Denmark.

It seems that Shopping China have their business cut-out by a lot of disgruntled Brazilians, if they advertise that heavily. XD

GraveUypo

yep, it's pretty much a shared city. the brazillian part of it is called "ponta-porã", and frankly, they look completely different. the moment you cross into pedro juan it's like you go a hundred years into the past.. it's much poorer and has much worse maintenance. it's actually pretty scary to go in deep. a lot of shady people trying to scam you into buying counterfeit cash and other illegal shit. there's a bunch of guards armed with shotguns all around too, which doesn't help at all.

that's why most people just stay at shopping china. it's the biggest department store in the whole country anyways and it's in the best part of the city. there are some other pretty good specialized stores (usually with even better price than shopping china) just a few blocks in so i always end up going there, but i just can't relax at all as long as i'm in pedro juan.

http://twitter.com/Lammjr Lamm

Grande ponta porã city, thanks to pedro juan being a tax free zone in paraguay we can enjoy high tech stuff in one of the most rural states in Brazil for the Best price in south america.

As for the armed guards, they are not even guards, they are just some dudes dressed as security, and they go around with their shotguns like bosses, Fucking scary place. That and the kids and shady dudes seling counterfeit viagra and extasy in the middle of the street in broad day light.

Really a place of surprising contrasts, and cheap stuff.

Vandré Brunazo

That's the Play Store price, not the retail price. Google sacrifices it's profits to sell it on their own stores. Retailers don't. There are still no Play Store devices in Brazil (they said they're working on it). The Nexus 4 is retailed at around $500~$600 in the US (bestbuy etc) before taxes. Local taxes are around 10% in the US, but 30% in Brazil. So the comparable retail price would be around $700 ish~, or R$1400. And I just bought it off Ponto Frio for R$1529 (no, it's not R$1700, I paid exactly R$1529).

Looking at another angle. My current phone is an S3 I paid around R$2000 for. That's still the average price for the S3 around most carrier stores. iPhone 4S is usually R$2200, iPhone 5 R$2400, Note 2 R$2400. IMHO, the only phone the N4 isn't just flat out better out of that list is the Note 2. Which you may or may not prefer because of the size. Other than that the N4 is the best phone you can currently buy in Brazil today. And it costs R$1500. Obviously the best bang for the buck you can possibly have today, and by a pretty large margin.

Yea, you could probably save around R$200 ($100) by importing it yourself from the US. (Actually would be even less, considering you'd either pay for profits of the ebay re-seller, or shipito.com equivalent + actual US taxes, but I'll give you the benefit of doubt). But even then you'd lose local warranty, which I have because I bought it here. Plus it's of course, much less trouble to go through.

All in all I think I made a very good deal buying my Nexus 4 for R$1529. It's way worth the money and I highly recommend it. Now I can't wait to get it 9 business days. And to get K in 2 months :)

strikermdd

Brazil have many taxes and corruption, the price of launched phones like Galaxy S3 (And now S4 there be start with R$ 3.000 / U$ 1.500 dollars) here starts with R$ 2.500+/ U$ 1.250. The PS3 Came here with the impressive price of R$ 7.000,00 / U$ 3.500,00 !!!! hehehe Brazil, a country of fools ...

http://www.facebook.com/ejpenha Eduardo Penha

... it is already sold out everywhere!

Shame..!

Alex

Most eletronic stuff is really expensive here in brazil. I was willing to buy a nexus 4 in the US, but I wouldn't have warranty here (My nexus 7, that I bought in ebay had a lot of issues and I ended throwing it in the garbage). I then paid almost R$1800 ($900) for an international galaxy S3, and I'm very happy with it.

Li’l Zé

Can I interest you in a b̶r̶i̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ brilliant Galaxy Note 2?
Western Union only please. It's safer!
lol just joking.
Shit at Brazil prices people better guard them phones tight when the world cup hits!
City Of God kids gonna be making mad cash swiping then selling them things off!

http://www.facebook.com/guilhermeds3 Guilherme Santos

Yeah, considering the S3 came at first for R$ 2099, this sounds actually cheap.
I bought a Xperia S for R$ 998 on a sale, that was pure luck. And yet, you guys on the US would have paid less than this any day. A friend of mine just imported a Nexus 4 from the US and paid R$ 1100.

Rodolfo Zatorre

It's unbelievable expensive, and it's not even imported, they are being made in Brazil, so, theres no such explanation like, well, it's being imported, so there are taxes...

Brazil's government is bs, the corruption in this country is so big, that they find a way to steal the population through everything, but that's not the concern in this post...

http://www.facebook.com/archercc Ryan Stewart

They are being made there? Mine is Korean?

Régis Knechtel

manufacturers choose to make them here to avoid the insane 60% import taxes

http://www.facebook.com/archercc Ryan Stewart

Ah, so specific to your market they are being made locally. Guess the rest of the world gets the Korean or Chinese ones (not that it really matters, vast majority is probably made robotically).

This Google trolling us. They already had an (aborted) attemp to sell the Nexus 7 early this year in Brazil, and now this terrible price on the Nexus 4. Thing is, Brazil is not a small or poor country - it is only full of inequality. Some local economists even call us "Belindia" (Belgium + India), a place where a small percentage of the population lives like an a rich belgian and the vast majority is living like a poor indian.

Why this commentary? To explain this: the Nexus 4 is already sold out on the online stores and, at the launch of the iPhone 5 (costing some whooping U$1600) there were midnight lines at a apple-affiliated store. I don't think a sane belgian would pay that much....

You guys up there got it so luck regarding tech and internet services and don't even know about it.

Dude!

Sorry, correction - it was actually 1200 (16gb). 1600 was for the 64gb one.

Now, that 1200 is a really great price! RIGHT?

faceless128

yeah, but you have beautiful women and amazing beaches.

fixxmyhead

Yea those thick ass brazilian thong wearing chick's :-)

Elias

Spoiler: those are the ones who can afford a $1500 iPhone. A minority. The vast majority is fat, ugly and POOR.

agg

In India, a small percentage of the population lives like an a rich Indian and the vast majority is living like a poor indian.

http://riteshtripathy.wordpress.com/ Ritesh

Why do they call it Belindia? Why not just India? I'm sure India has a much larger rich population than the whole of Belgium. And the vast majority is unbelievably poor. Its the middle class that matters to any consumer market. The super rich percentage is so small that its irrelevant and the poor are out of the context anyway.

It's a thing we call the Brazil Price, like if they don't complain so let's keep it's an awful thing. This price is really cheap the iPhone 5 64GB here it cost almost USD$1500.

We have this price in almost everything from cars to food. A common Brazilian gets USD$2000 per month in salary, the government stole a quarter of it in Tax directly and another quarter in product taxes. If we had lower prices like US and other countries almost every Brazilian will be rich.

I will wait till next nexus because i won't buy a phone and 1 month latter it's old. The galaxy nexus started selling 1 month after the US sales, and the price was R$1599 in the Store.

It's an LG product everything from LG here in Brazil it's expensive.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1745689461 Hal Motley

Sounds broken to me when an Apple product is labelled "really cheap". XD

Guilherme

An average brazilian gets US$2000 per month? Are you insane?! Sorry mate, but do your homework before posting such crazy things! I'd say it's more like US$800. Everything in Brazil is very expensive, price for imported things are ridiculous. People try hard to show their status, that's why iPhones are super expensive - people want to show off.
Dont miss Brazil, Im happy in New Zealand.

Elias

$2000 is the starting salary of an ENGINEER, after 6 years of hard study, and even then is hard to get that salary because enterprises like to hire engineers as analists to lower their salary. $2000 couldn't be further from average. The average salary of a housekeeper is $400, and a car mechanic $800.

Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho

For comparisons:

Galaxy Note 2 is around 1800 to 2300
Galaxy S3 is around 1700 to 2100
Razr I (midrange) is around 1000 to 1200

You'd think with contract it gets cheaper, but actually it's not much. The Note, on an expensive plan would reach around 1100.

So yes it's expensive, but it is now probably the cheapest high end available.

BTW, iPhone 5 is around 2700-4000, no kidding, and that's why they really mean it when they say you can pay the plane ticket to US and back, buy it there, spend a couple of days touring and still pay LESS than buying it here.

What impresses me most is that even with this pricing, Brazil is still one of the places where smartphone sales are growing exponentially.

I live in Malaysia, where the 16GB Nexus 4 launched with an suggested retail price of about RM1699.00, or about 570 US Dollars, more than $200 over the the price Stateside.

I'm not sure what the deal is with Brazil, but I get the impression that Nexus devices get launched at a steep price premium in markets where the Play Store isn't fully functional - you can buy apps, but other categories like Music, Movies, Books and such are closed off. In these markets, Google divests its marketing and distribution responsibilities to LG (and in the case of the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, Asus and Samsung respectively).

Given that Google is only nominally involved in marketing these products and that profit margins cannot depend on streaming subscriptions, the OEMs jack up the prices. Which would be a little easier to stomach if they upped the local storage on the Nex4 because, you know, people in markets like mine don't have easy access to content over the cloud - we still keep music and TV show episodes onboard.

If you find it expensive you need to know abt the iPhone price in Brazil: U$1.500

Lfel

Considering our minimum wage is R$678, I sincerely expected Google and/or the retailers to buckle it up and sell it cheaper. Guess not, everyone likes their huge profit margins here.

Darius_bd

I dont think it's such great news, the N4 is also being sold in Chile and Poland by the carriers. The true novelty would it being sold in the Play Store but I think there's still a long road there for Brazil

Łukasz Podgórski

In Poland nexus 4 16gb is for 1679,00 pln which is 514 usd (with taxes), so it's not that bad (same price as gs3 and lower as note2) for that phone. Can't wait for google to open full google play experience! What is taking so long you guys?

Sorry, I'm from Brazil and it's very overwhelming to live there if you don't have the money to make it - I guess it would be in any country, right? But anyway , the average salary is R$600 - R$3.75/h. Keeping that in mind, how can the average people afford the Nexus 4? nai nai! Most of the people won't be able to afford that unless they don't feed their family and get into debt.

http://twitter.com/Lammjr Lamm

not the average, the minimum wage is R$ 680,00 The average is around R1,700,00 as far as I know.

Brunna Koala

Not where I lived.

Aldo Medeiros

Here in Brazil, we take capitalism to the next level :p
Let´s talk about real profit ;)
Honestly... as long as there are people spending their money on these absurd prices, these gadgets will always be priced like that.
Please bear with my english. I speak portuguese.

Elias

Brazil's abusive import taxes (60% over product+shipping, then another 28% over product+shipping+the previous tax of 60%) don't even matter in this case, n4 is made locally; so it has no import taxes and manufacturers are even provided lots of tax exemption. But it's just like Apple when they brought their manufacturing to Brazil and chose not to reduce the price of the iPhone despite all tax exemption they received: If people are stupid enough to pay these outrageous prices despite their stupidly low salary ($400-1000 average, $2000 starting salary for an engineer, one of the best jobs here which obviously requires tough university courses), why even bother lowering the prices? Why do you think a Jeep Grand Cherokee sold in the US for $28k is sold in Brazil for $89,500? We, brazilians, are all the stupidest clowns paying the highest taxes in the world and accepting all this corruption and overpricing shat upon us.
Source for the Jeep pricing: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/08/11/brazils-ridiculous-80000-jeep-grand-cherokee/
Overpricing is the rule on everything here. TVs, computers, smartphones, even food (regular price for a 30cm diameter pizza is $20-$30). Expect everything to cost between 200% and 400% of their price in the US.
And that's why I want to leave this shitty country. Poverty, utter disrespect from the government and from enterprises. There's a reason why gun ownership is banned here, or we'd start a revolution.

Elias

Sorry, gun ownership is "allowed". Restricted only to a few kinds of weapons and ammunition, and you gotta have a special license, register in advance, wait for authorization, pay a lot of fees... A boatload of bureaucracy to disencourage gun ownership. And gun carry is strictly forbidden, only allowed to police and security agents.

Elias

For the record, my last phone (galaxy s) and current (n4) came from the US. Counting phone, bumper, shipping, shipito fees and and 2-day reshipping from Oregon to Florida (from where a friend brought it to me, tax free) it costed me $430. Price difference is enough to pay for a one-way plane ticket to the USA.

Also for the record, a 16gb nexus 7 costs here R$1300 (roughly $650).

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=867995173 Eduardo Pimentel

The issue with the Nexus 4 is not a new one or any news for anyone living in a South-American country. This same absurd price is true for all electronic devices. iPads will go for as little as AR$ 3800 (US$ 760) and a PS3 is sold officially at around AR$ 4500 (US$ 900) in the case of Argentina.

This is all meant to protect the national industry and whatnot, but I don't see many Argentine companies making PS3 competitors or whatever.

In the end people still buy their PS3s and iPads, just that they do it through eBay or similar websites, through people who bring electronics from the US in order to sell them online and recover some of the money spent on the trip. The sad thing is, the government doesn't see a single penny out of these endeavours. You would think they're rather lower the taxes and walk away with a little bit less money, rather than charge a lot and not see any money at all...

http://riteshtripathy.wordpress.com/ Ritesh

And I thought the import duties and pricing of electronics in India was crazy!